Officials say it may take several weeks to identify victims as traditional methods - such as fingerprinting and visual identification - may not be possible.

“Please also keep in mind, traditional means of identification such as fingerprinting and visual identification may not be available and will add more time for naming these decedents,” stated the medical examiner.

The medical examiner’s office will first use dental records to make an identification, although that requires doctors to have some idea of who the person is, Ukpo said.

That cuts across both target identification and molecule design, and can potentially introduce biases.

A personal identification number was introduced so people could not just disappear without a trace after they were born.